DEMOS

The apparent re-emergence of Russian centralised planning caught my attention over the weekend. It doesn't, according to Deputy PM Vladimir Yakovlev, amount to a return to amusingly scientific output specifications for nails and screwdrivers, but rather a means to integrate cross-regional planning needs. Or, as Alexander Khloponin, Govenor of the Krasnoyarsk Territory, suggested - 'We must adjust aims and tasks, and not supplies of nails and products'.

So: less hardware determinism and more centrally integrated planning across Russia's many regions.

One of the criticisms of our planning system from the free market pocket of the planning debate - for example, from the Policy Exchange - is that the system has become 'Soviet' like in its regulatory centrality.

Whatever the merits of those arguments, it seems a more interesting area is the search for what organising principle is driving our current system - a planning system which sees large infrastrutural projects seen as necessary and casts those local voices opposed to them as unhelpful 'NIMBYs'.

The real Soviet system was criticised on one level for claiming to have captured the public good and for trying to centrally control the delivery of that good. We tend to think of liberal free market economies as having crushed that centralism.

But it would seem that there is still a national 'public good' perceived by government which we all (have to) buy in to. It seems relatively uncontroversial to say that the government sees that as growth.

We might have forgone determining how many Philips screwdrivers are available in Corby. But it just seems somewhat amusing that the agenda of growth impacts most publicly and controversially on planning.

The differences and similarities between the Gosplan and the DCLG are much more interesting than a naive free-market critique concerned with over-regulation.

Efforts to reimagine how people legitimise the planning system might have to focus on how we produce locally-specific but nationally consistent 'social contracts' (perhaps a clumsy term). But they might also need to deal with how connected people feel to major infrastructure projects legitimised by the language of growth. And further, perhaps, to the unease the government must feel around 'interfering' in that agenda.

It's complex stuff, and one feels that the tension between national and local - and what both terms mean - is absolutely central to most planning debates.